Meeting Minutes of the Czechoslovak Government in London

The book was published as a part of a long-term project "Meeting Minutes of the Czechoslovak Government in London" of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, v.v.i., the Masaryk's Institutes and Archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in cooperation with the National Archive in Prague. The purpose of the project is to gradually publish all the 185 meeting minutes of the exile Czechoslovak government in London during the World War Two.

The first volume of Meeting Minutes of the Czechoslovak Government in London (1940-1941), which was worked out by editors Jan Němeček, Ivan Šťovíček, Helena Nováčková and Jan Kuklík, presents on 877 pages series of documents relating to 1st – 43rd meeting of the government in the period 1940-1941; furthermore, it contains introductory historical studies, editorial and indexes. The volume has been published with a support of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic. The book, which describes activities of the Czechoslovak government in exile during the World War Two, is a part of historical research of that period and its inclusion in the historical memory of inhabitants of the Czech Republic.

The authors of the Meetings Minutes of the Czechoslovak Government in London (1940-1941) managed to concentrate and publish meeting minutes of the government from its provisional recognition by the Great Britain in summer 1940 to the end of 1941. Works on the volume comprised collecting all the meeting minutes of that period (with the exception of the only one of 12 of all the government's meetings, which had been found neither in Czech nor in relevant archives abroad), accompanying documents, their transcription, editorial works, language revision, comments, print preparation and publishing. Meeting minutes of the Czechoslovak government in exile in London, programmes of the individual government meetings, and its resolutions serve as a basis of the series. Part of the series is also appendices to the government's meetings which form mostly reports of the individual ministers presented at meetings of the government. All the series is accompanied by the introductory study (divided into two parts: the first one is a general introduction on not only this volume but also on the following volumes; the second one deals exclusively with the period 1940-1941), the sources survey on the individual themes, editorial including appendices concerning biographic profiles of members of the government, surveys on archive location and programmes of the government's meetings and addresses of the Czechoslovak offices in London; the conclusion form geographical and name indexes and the English resume. As it is stated in one of the expert's opinion, "the range of issues debated during meetings of the government, included in the first volume of the series, covers broad spectrum of themes – starting from matters connected with the process of recognition of the government in exile and intensive talks with the Polish government in exile on the post-war confederative/federative arrangement, exile reflexion of the situation in the Protectorate, general war situation, aid to Czechoslovak refugees in the British Islands, organization of the Czechoslovak troops, various budgetary debates up to controversial financial-economic matters, for example ...".

Meeting minutes of the Czechoslovak government in exile ranks among sets of archive documents which have been discovered recently; it was in 2002 in fact, in the course of stocktaking of the Beneš's documents in the Archive of the Institute of T.G. Masaryk. Only few meeting minutes of the total number of meetings, which had been deposited in other archives, were known were known by then. By the time of the start of the project, only 2 records had been completely published. Apart from typed transcripts of documents, also manuscript documents exist that are placed in the archive of the Presidium of the Ministerial Council – London in the National Archive in Prague; with regard to their illegible character they are not easily exploitable.

The series takes up the publication of 60 records of meetings of the Czechoslovak National Committee in Paris, precursor of the Czechoslovak government of 1939-1940, which were published by a similar collective of authors in 1999 (From the disintegration of Czech-Slovakia to the recognition of the Czechoslovak provisional government. Appendix: Meeting Minutes of the Czechoslovak National Committee 1939-1940, edited by Jan Kuklík, Jan Němeček, Helena Nováčková, Ivan Šťovíček, Prague 1999, 352 p.) Meetings of the Czechoslovak government of 1918-1938 in the form of catalogues and indexes to protocols of the respective government and in the form of series of selected parts of protocols of meetings of the respective governments are making available by workers of the Central State Archive or National Archive in Prague, based on collections of he Presidium of the Ministerial Council.

The book Meeting Minutes of the Czechoslovak Government in London (1940-1941), which describes activities of the Czechoslovak exile, is a homage to the fight for national sovereignty during the World War Two. The series makes accessible one of basic sources relating to the Czechoslovak history in the World War Two and it will certainly become for the home and foreign community a basic material which synthetically describes that historical period.

Edition of further three parts in more volumes, which would cover the period 1942-1945, should be the continuation of the long-term project Meeting Minutes of the Czechoslovak Government in London. The result will depend on the support given to it.